Tragedy: Waiting for the laughter to start

Usually I ignore idiotic comment but sometimes the idiocy is so apropos that the petty response is the right response - here because the writer is normally sane but produced a stunning indictment of his own position.

The strangest response to last week's blog wasn't Scotth's contention that you can buy a zOS machine for $33K - you can, and for only another couple of hundred thousand you can license enough software to emulate a 9370 on it.

No, the hands down winner for tragi-comedy was this, from "civikminded":

RE: Forces of nature @Roger Ramjet

You can run Windoze through DumbRays.

Sure.. what do you need on the back end? VMWare ESX. Wait.. or VirtualBox (I'll go on with this post when the laughter dies down)

All your 'Autonomics' can be achieved on Windows with Virtual Desktop Broker apps that have been available for 5-6 years. In fact with VMWare View, I can serve out thousands of desktops from a single OS image. No, not thousands of copies of a single OS image. 1 single OS image.

Here's a person whose response to the proposition that DP and Wintel have effectively merged to perpetuate the worst of both as the new standard, is to argue that: "I can serve out thousands of desktops from a single OS image. No, not thousands of copies of a single OS image. 1 single OS image. "

Notice the use of "I" in his claim? He can run thousands of virtual PCs from ONE OS image - provided the servers silently boot Unix to run Windows OSes as applications, the clients are PCs running Windows OSes, only some specially certified applications are allowed; and users? They get to put up and shut up.

I don't think he could have done better had he intended to demonstrate that today's Windows data centers tend to reproduce the worst features of IBM's 1970s mainframe world - and had he wanted to show that the people defending this nonsense often understand neither their own technology nor anyone else's; well, I doubt he could have improved on this either.

So what's going on? As regular readers know I think Festinger made a lot of sense, and what he'd say in this situation is clear: the more arrogant and absurd responses like these get, the clearer it should be that the people involved know they're wrong but are desperately hoping that enough shouting will, like the proverbial trillion monkeys typing out King Lear, eventually reveal something justifying what they're doing to their users and employers.